The Joy of Pins.

Belaying Pins that is !

Belaying pins courtesy of Dave’s (Daveys) pins emporium a la Pratchett

Up until this month iv’e never used or owned a belaying pin, to be honest iv’e never needed one and never felt greatly compelled to biff somebody over the head with one a la captain Aubrey and his merry jack tars. Rather I grew up (in sailing that is) using static jam cleats that always seemed to let go of a line just at the worst moment and only came back around to using traditional horn cleats because they’re actually very effective with modern cordage and a damn sight cheaper than modern jam cleats when I made my own in the workshop.

Home made Ash horn cleats taking shape in the workshop – originally made for the Pathfinder and I am going to use the 2 spare ones for the CLC Passagemaker dinghy and thus save some £40 a pop for commercially made ones – at that price I would just buy some more Ash and make my own.

This week, as I write, it suddenly became apparent that I had no way of belaying the halyard for my little CLC dinghy (I didn’t have a halyard either) so I started thinking about what bits n pieces I had kicking around in the workshop. For such a simple boat though all of my solutions seemed to require technical parts – blocks, jammers and the like but then I came across a blogger who was talking about rigging a similar lug sailed dinghy and what he used was a simple belaying pin as there was one already in his boat and they’re a cinch to buy and fit – all they need is a hole drilled through the mast thwart and a quick coating of snot/gloop (Epoxy)

Correction – I pulled out the 2 unused cleats and only then could see why i’d never used them- I must have made those 2 when I was learning how to make nicely proportioned cleats and those 2 were anything but. I had a whole set of Nylon cleats left over from some project or other so I just used a pair of them : given that the CLC Passagemaker is a very basic boat they don’t seem much out of place.

It’s been a bit of a weird week with the little CLC Passagemaker – my mainsail arrived and as i’d already cut the spar tubes to size I thought all I had to do was lace the sail on, rustle up a temporary halyard and get ready to go out for it’s inaugural sail. What actually happened is that none of the spars fit, the boom and yard are both just short enough that I can’t tension the sail properly and the mast is at least a foot short of being able to get a full hoist ; today I started taking everything apart again and now I can’t drill out the rivets holding the eye straps despite trying with my bench drill press. I’m going to have to order 3 new tubes from the alloy dealer so it feels like one of those 2 steps backwards kind of weeks.

Postscipt – another post which needed ‘what happened next ?’

So……why, after such a breakneck pace refit is the Passagemaker still languishing at one side of the yard while everything else gets done around it ?. Well, it’s because ‘reasons’ – the many and varied ressons being : waiting for the new spar tubes to arrive, not being able to get the old Harken pad eyes off the old spars resulting in me having to wait for new ones (21 day lead time on order) and then when they did finally arrive I failed on the simple task of riveting the new ones on – they just kept pulling straight through the thin walled alloy tube.* Then….other jobs got in the way – for example clearing the debris pile out of the yard and trying to put some useful time into the Pathfinder……honestly, for a retired guy post stroke I don’t have enough time in the day for 3 concurrent boat projects…….hard life eh ?

*I eventually solved the problem by using slightly softer alloy rivets and specifically a 4.8mm drill bit to drill the holes with – this was my at least 3rd try to get the 4.8mm drill bit actually delivered here and not lost in the Amazon postal jungle.